


desperados under the eaves

by Hyb



Series: a home at the end of the world [2]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alexandria Safe-Zone, M/M, Post Finale, Spoilers, gratuitous beer drinking, gratuitous porch swinging, smut and thangs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 01:04:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3709271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/Hyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl knows how to exorcise his ghosts, Rick thinks. It's the present that weighs him down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	desperados under the eaves

**Author's Note:**

> In which the author (and Rick) are unsatisfied by the conclusion of [scream hell towards heaven's door](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3669564)

It takes time. To double the guard on the walls, alert for living men creeping through the trees. To arm his people inside. To lock Nicholas in a wine cellar awaiting judgment, and bar Gabriel from setting foot outside the gates. Days pass and no tank blasts open their doors, no buildings roar in flames. Then Rick can breathe again. Be still.

Dusk settles, soaking the air dark, and he props a hip against the porch railing. Savors a beer in measured sips. No more drunken lapses. Rick has to see clearly, for all of them. Glenn and Maggie are curled on the porch swing, Glenn's shoulder bandaged clean. He's arguing for the man who shot him while Maggie cards her fingers through his hair.

“He's a coward. He's weak and he's scared,” Glenn says, flat with disdain. There's a growl behind Maggie's teeth that ought to have Nicholas digging his own grave.

“Noah died because of him,” Rick returns, hard and calm with his fingers curled around a bottle. He doesn't have to sermonize. Glenn knows. Glenn saw. “Then he tries to kill you, for nothing. If he knew how to use that gun you'd be dead. You want to sleep behind the same walls as him?”

“It's letting him outside the walls that we can't afford,” Glenn argues. “Shoot him if you see a gun in his hand, I don't care. But he has to live with himself. Rick, you know this is right, you went back for _Merle_ ,” he says, chased by a guilty glance at Daryl.

Daryl sits with his knees drawn up, back to the railing. He's whittling new bolts to season, knife flashing silver. A pyre of shavings accumulates between his boots. He hitches a taut shrug at the slight, where once he would have exploded in shrapnel and fury. Daryl knows how to exorcise his ghosts, Rick thinks. It's the present that weighs him down. Daryl's wet cat sulk hasn't eased up since their arrival. 

And he's taken care not to be alone with Rick since he stroked him off and left, a week ago.

“Thirty days bread and water,” Rick relents. Symbolic, really. They'll be feeding him applesauce and beans. Nicholas won't learn how days of hunger become weeks, gnaw a cavern through you. “Then we let him out, call it probation. As far as I'm concerned, he's yours to put down if he so much as sneezes wrong.” It may come to that yet. Doesn't itch his conscience any. Every man is responsible for his own choices. Just now, they can be generous. Tara is awake, begging pudding cups off Rosita. Rick didn't execute her only chance at recovery. 

Distant shouts draw nearer and Carl jogs down the middle of the road in his pack of gangly teenagers. When they tumble past the house he hangs back a step, craning to find Rick in the dim. Hovers awaiting Rick's shallow nod, the all-clear, before sprinting to catch up. His son's shirttails flutter back, a fleeting glimpse of the .32 tucked into his jeans.

The children are recovering faster than the adults. They didn't see Reg fall, or Pete, and secondhand stories pale fast. 

Jessie flinches, involuntary, if she catches sight of Rick without warning. Doesn't cringe away, but she's afraid of him now, survival instinct balking. This is the truth: the Alexandrians saw Pete break, saw the blood fountain from severed arteries. They can't haul Nicholas out cold and put one between his eyes, no matter how warranted. Their neighbors tread a slippery border between uneasy acceptance and panic. 

The shadows deepen to indigo, pools of ink. The kind of velvet silence they've all learned to prize. No screams, no gnashing teeth, soft quiet nothing like gunshot deafness. Maggie tilts her beer back for a final sip, catches moonlight in the bottle. In the lighter's flare Daryl's face blazes a holy apparition. Gold and vermilion tighten to an ember glow, smoke drifting bittersweet into Rick's lungs.

“Anybody ever tell you how we met Rick?” Glenn muses to his wife, vowels gone beer slack. “Goddamn cowboy. Rode into Atlanta on a _horse_ like the Lone Ranger.”

“Yeah, I felt like the Lone Ranger with my ass chafing. Hadn't been in a saddle more years than I care to count,” he continues, mild as May over Maggie's startled guffaw. Sense memory floods him again: Marlboros, fresh hay, the dense smell of cattle. “I'll have one of those,” Rick decides, lifting his chin to Daryl. The ruby tip trails like a comet as Daryl plucks the cigarette from his mouth. Only the ripple of his silhouette betrays any consternation.

“You don't smoke,” Glenn objects, indignant like Rick just switched from checkers to chess. It's fair. The world has narrowed to family and strangers. It's knowing their geography, their faults and landmarks, that keeps you real.

Daryl isn't getting up so Rick sinks down onto his heels to meet him. Flips the proffered cigarette snug between his knuckles. Daryl conjures the lighter from thin air, a snap of the wrist. Rick dips to feed the flame on his inhale, cheeks hollowing. Close enough to linger in the radius of Daryl's heat, catch the molten nickel glare of his eyes before the dark floods back. 

Rick flows up from his crouch, back to lounging on the railing. Now he's firmly in Daryl's space, nipping at his territory. Close enough to stroke the nape of his neck, if he wanted, the band between collar and hair made leather by layers of sunburn. A tender thing, knowing the cartography of his skin by rote. 

“Never was _much_ of a smoker,” he grants. Daryl is keeping his head down, elbows tucked in, his whittling surrendered to the night. 

The past is so much closer to the surface here. Rick sees ghosts in the gauzy curtains that catch the breeze like veils. Wedding dress white. 

“Worked a while for some family in Kentucky,” he says, to questions unasked. Expels his phantoms word by word. “Had a farm supply store, sixty head of cattle besides. A few horses to ride if you didn't just trip into bed and pass out after supper.” Finished school a term early and couldn't stand the idleness. Fresh air beat flipping burgers by a mile, and he needed the money. Money used to rule lives, dates and dollars. Now Rick can't even remember that urgent greenback rasp. 

“Long story short, I was trying to impress a guy. So it goes.” Rick drags out an inhale, fingers shielding his grin. Didn't think he remembered this, how to jibe. Shoot the shit like long hot afternoons in a squad car. 

Glenn's bolted upright, snapping his head from Rick to Maggie and back again. “What?” He sounds as young as Rick remembers, once upon a time in a tank.

“Honestly,” Maggie scoffs, tugging her husband back against her. “It's still the twenty-first century. Don't act so surprised.”

“Did you know?” Glenn accuses, all cartoon outrage.

“Didn't know.” She strokes his hair down flat again. “But Tara owes me a candy bar. And I'm thinking Rick has a story. Come on,” she cajoles, molasses sweet. The unsinkable Maggie Greene. “You never talk about before. Was he cute?”

She's got Daryl off-guard, choking on his exhale. Rick feels weightless, beer mellow. This porch is their island, for now.

“Careful now,” he drawls. “You stop breathing and I'll have to dust off my mouth to mouth.” Innocuous enough, but it's a jab between them. Rick wants to lecture Daryl on the bases, how he skipped the kissing bit. Daryl is so still he could grow roots.

“Yeah,” he returns to Maggie, sly . “He was handsome.” 

The memory's untarnished, glossy as a stone worn smooth. The details punch up bright. Simon leaning with a flannel tied around his rattlesnake hips. The white flash of his teeth. Broad hands gentling down the neck of a skittish mare. The blue black length of his hair, how it caught on the wind like a pennant. 

“He trained my aunt's horses. He'd smoke outside the barn – and wouldn't you know, suddenly I needed to bum a light. Twice a day,” he laughs, rusty. The cigarettes are stale, they never did taste _good_ , but nostalgia wins. 

Never shared the story before. Not with Shane, not with anyone. Simon may be long dead, same as Rick's aunt and uncle, his parents. Everyone he ever met is dead until proven living. They only exist now in stories like these, so Rick keeps the memory close, crisp as a postcard. 

“I told Maggie I liked Pablo Neruda,” Glenn fesses up, grasping for solidarity. 

“Oh, honey.” Maggie is fighting down laughter so hard her voice shakes. “You're the worst liar. But it was cute, you trying. Going on about 'the one with the hair, and the eyes'. Everybody does it,” she adds. “I switched all my classes senior year to follow Bobby Marcum around, and he was still calling me Marie at graduation. I think Rick's summer loving was better.”

“It was alright.” A pluming exhale stretches his grin wide, eyes creasing. He'll never be that young again, so he'll live in the recollection for a little while.

“Don't seem the type,” Daryl says at last, void of inflection.

Rick shrugs. In truth it feels satisfying as a punch thrown. The first blow to break their stalemate. “I know what I want when it's in front of me,” he says.

  


  
  


Rick knows what he'll cling to, now. Won't make the mistake of letting go again. Not like Lori, the way they slipped further apart. They lost the language of loving each other until they were strangers shouting in tongues. Whatever she was trying to tell him, he wouldn't hear her. Rick had clapped his hands over his ears. He held his bitter grudge when she wouldn't absolve him, and then it was too late.

She wouldn't say _you're not like your father, that isn't you_.

  
  
  


  


The pumpkins and winter squash are waxing ripe on the vine. Rick sinks his fingers into the black earth and it doesn't call to him. No singing him home. It's just dirt.

He's watched all Deanna's tapes now, learned the people he's to call his own. Morgan, head bent over a row of carrots like a man at prayer, he'll fit into the weave of this place. Most of these people don't have the stomach for violence.

It came to him, fast forwarding over tears and hand-wringing. That Deanna is a sharp eye, but she can't _see_. She has to dissect her people on their stutters and twitching eyelids. While Rick has a family, and they tell him the truth. It's not even a question. Rick would trust Sasha, Abraham, Michonne, Carol at his back as sure as he would Daryl. He'd dive in headfirst and never look behind.

“You here to try and convince me executing that man was right?” Morgan rumbles without looking up. Their first and last conversation on reunion fell into a tangle of guilt, defiance.

It gnawed at Rick, that night. Wrenched at his guts, but he knows the answer now. Mercy is a fine notion when you only have to look out for yourself. When you're only gambling your own life. Rick is sword and shield for his family. He'll cut down anyone who stands against them, and he'll do it with a clear conscience.

“That's not you, Rick,” Morgan urges into the silence.

“That's where you're wrong.” Rick shakes his head, shedding doubt like water. (You don't kill _people_ , Morgan protested that night. Hollowed out with disbelief, beseeching.)

“The people I've had to kill? I can sleep knowing every one of them had to die,” Rick says, precise. Rises, dusting his hands on his jeans. “Time's gonna come again, brother, when you have to ask yourself what you're willing to do.”

  
  
  


  


It's agreed, they suspend recruiting until further notice. Morgan attacked, Daryl and Aaron snared, that goddamn letter everywhere they look. Take no risks, not until they know who and what they're dealing with.

Daryl isn't any easier to find inside the gates. Takes all afternoon to track him down, and then he appears, turning a corner. Just like a damn cat, in every way. Vanishing without a trace only to lope out, unconcerned. He's with Aaron, heads turned in conversation. 

Aaron wasn't afraid of him before, not like he should have been. Now he swallows tightly to see Rick approach, goes quiet until Daryl follows his stare.

Rick pastes on a grin and feels like a dog baring fang. “I need to borrow Daryl a minute. Think you can spare him?”

Daryl is wary, shoulders tight. But he follows. 

Back to the house they're making home. Once over the threshold he kicks off his boots, and his bare steps are near silent. Feels like prowling, hunting, as he urges Daryl up the stairs ahead of him. Up and up to the attic hazy in afternoon sun, ripe with cedar. 

There's a mattress wedged in the corner, a stack of linens folded crisp at the center. Milk crates in crooked columns. No one's slept up here, not yet. There's no shortage of bedrooms between the two houses. Rick hooks a finger toward the open window, and Daryl pads up to look. No one can creep silent in Red Wing boots quite like Daryl Dixon. 

Rick can read when he sees the ladder - the snap of his neck, dipping his head like a boxer. It was hard enough herding him around the far side of the house without notice. Daryl recovers well, sizing Rick up from the corner of his eye. 

“I ain't the one gonna talk to Carl if he's sneaking a girl up here.”

“Nah,” Rick breathes, satisfied. A tendril of anticipation uncoils in his gut. “This is where you'll sleep.”

“The hell I will.” Daryl squints his disbelief. 

“Yes, you will.” Rick can be patient. Like Carl made him believe – you have to say it so they can hear you. “Use the ladder if you want. You can come and go how you like. But I'll sleep better knowing where you are.”

Daryl won't face him toe to toe. Keeps watching from the side. This is how Rick remembers him from what seems a lifetime ago. Creeping at the edges like some feral thing. Stays near but removed, his _look at me don't look at me_ carriage 

“No thanks,” Daryl rasps, pointed. His voice is more sandpaper than whiskey, lately; he's been smoking more. A red warning glow never far from hand. He's drifting away from Rick's scrutiny, turning his back to gauge their surroundings. An overturned crate flanks the bed, and what waits there is blatant as an offering on a barren altar. Daryl hones in on the incongruity.

“The hell is that?”

“Coconut oil. From the pantry,” Rick supplies. Eats up the distance between them in three long strides. Just close enough to be deliberate, he twists the lid, scent flooding out. Hints of sunblock, nostalgia. Daryl accepts the jar grudgingly, without touching Rick's skin. A proper whiff, unimpressed.

“This is what we'll use when I fuck you,” Rick explains gently.

Soothing as he can be, when he's taking the weight of the initiative from Daryl's shoulders. Daryl still snaps back like a bowstring, elbow banging the window frame. Shocked pale, and whatever he sees wipes the furrow from his brow, eyes widening. 

“Don't you tilt your fucking head at me,” he warns, nostrils pinched white.

Rick hadn't noticed, but there it is. The pull in his neck, the eager blood beat in his ears. It makes him grin with all his teeth, savage and free. One step to erase Daryl's retreat, another turn in this dance they've been spinning. Daryl carries the wild with him and he's everything Rick wants to taste, hold, keep.

“What happened, it didn't mean nothing,” Daryl spits, cornered.

“I say it meant something. Meant a lot.” A careful hand in the dawn dark. _Oh_ , Rick had thought, snared from the fog of his thoughts. Yielded effortless, trusting. Wondered if it was always coming to this, inevitability closing the circuit between them.

“Trouble is, you didn't stay. Makes me wonder if you had something to prove.” Rick is fast, but Daryl can dart like a snake – he could slip free, if he wanted. Means he lets Rick spin him chest first into the wall, kick his feet apart.

“Brace your hands,” he says low, and Daryl shivers like a plucked string. He complies, but he wrings Rick's name out _raw_.

“Hey.” Rick skates palms down his flanks, and Daryl stops breathing. “You say stop, we stop. Easy as that. We go cut a couple slices of casserole and we call it a day, yeah?” A beat, and only silence answers. The bare swell of Daryl's ribs breathing in. Rick knows the mass of Daryl, the strength in him. Learned it before he had a brother to carry, knocking Daryl back on a locked arm. Open palm restraint, standard issue.

Rick is still jarred by his own reflection. He doesn't see the wild man bearded like Moses any more than he recognizes the stranger shaven clean. The only truth he has is that he can be what his people need.

He can lead Daryl to what they _both_ need, but just now he's struggling to keep a straight face. He's unbuttoned Daryl, petted him down the seam of his torso gone sweat damp. Rick's gotten them stuck with the shirt just cresting Daryl's shoulders, pulled tight over muscle. 

It's Daryl who laughs, rusty. Turns his cheek into the wall and holds his arms out straight behind so Rick can undress him. Same posture he'd hold to be cuffed, and Daryl knows it well.

“Didn't y'all get any practice bossing pony boy around?” He taunts.

“Nah,” Rick says, marveling. Daryl's got himself braced again, elbow to wrist up by his face. Already easing into this – unquestioning, power rippling contained across his shoulders. Daryl knows well how fallible Rick is; the miracle is that he follows anyway. Saw something in Rick long bleak winters ago that Rick didn't believe in himself. “Nah, you're the only one I wanna boss.” Rick turns Daryl's jaw to kiss him proper, all messy angled eagerness. Sighs into his mouth until Daryl cants his hips back, spine dipping a sinful arch.

Rick delays, nuzzles the valley of Daryl's shoulders until it's rubbed hot from stubble. He knows that raw feeling, exposed. Without his beard, his skin feels tissue thin. Blood pumps closer to the surface, veins swollen like summer rivers. 

This is a debt he owes to Daryl, that he remembers how to touch with kindness. Daryl reached out when others shied away. A steady hand teaching him in syllables, fleeting, so he couldn't lose the language.

When they're both newborn naked Rick fits himself against Daryl's back. Takes reverent hold of his genitals and learns the weight of him, what's offered unguarded.

“See, I know what you were trying to prove,” he breathes out. “You were taking care of me. Now I'm gonna take care of you.”

Cedar and coconut, so thick in the air he's dizzy. A morsel of warm skin caught between his teeth as he rubs the knot of Daryl in tight circles. Patient until he yields, a stutter flex that has Rick sinking in easy as breathing. Daryl curses; he crushes his face into his forearm and _shakes_ , gorgeous. 

“Stay with me now,” Rick murmurs rough. He could lose himself to this, Daryl rippling hot and hidden around the crook of his fingers. Daryl shifts his thighs wider, unbidden. Rick hums praise against his pulse. “After everything, you think I'm gonna lose you?” Rick twists his wrist like a key in a lock. Grazes a bump of resistance that makes Daryl _keen_ behind clenched teeth, hips stuttering. 

“I'll make you happy,” Rick swears, threatens, he'll take Daryl apart until he's burnished to a shine, until he glows under his skin. They were dead men, they had to be, hollowed out. The wind whispered empty through them but that was before. Now it's time to live.

Feels nothing like a battering ram, opening Daryl up. His hand pistons easier on each glide, oil trailing glass bright down his wrist, rim stretched sleek and pink. Daryl's hitched breaths bleed into curses until he's clawing at Rick's hip, fighting to drag them flush. Rick obliges. Smears the head of his dick against all that slick and Daryl hammers his fist on the wall.

“You know what to do with it or not?” Daryl rasps over his shoulder, scorches Rick in that narrow-eyed glitter.

“Need to hear it at least the once,” he says. As if his skin isn't twitching, heart jumping into his throat like he's eighteen, awestruck.

Daryl tries for a glare, the corner of his mouth is curling up. “You gonna talk at me all day, jackass, or you gonna fuck me?” That snarl breaks into a moan so pretty when Rick sinks an inch. He's got a fist tangled in Rick's curls, arching himself back to be impaled. Rick knows the feeling. How the friction liquefies into a slow burn, sparks catching with every breath you shift. He's ready when Daryl's knees falter, weight falling to the bridge of Rick's thighs. Now he's the one bracing them against the wall. Daryl is mouthwatering broad in the shoulders, cleaved from granite. All that power and he narrows down to a sleek waist for Rick's arm to enfold 

Slow, it has to be slow. Wearing each others skin, rocking an uncomplicated rhythm. Slow to learn Daryl inside out. Rick can see clearly now, where the need to protect muddles with owning, control. How Daryl's always given without asking.

“Our _family_ ,” he pants into Daryl's ear. “They're here. Alive. Because of you. You think that's nothing, what you are to me?” Once Rick didn't know the words, couldn't make himself speak when it mattered. 

Daryl shoves his hips back and Rick ignites from balls to belly, combustion in his lungs. He stripes Daryl's back, scars overlaid in claim. Shoulders rubbed incandescent from his stubble, imprints of teeth. This is who they are now, the maps by which they'll navigate. 

“Where you think you're going?” He snares Daryl trying to tighten up his watery knees, rolls him down to the bare mattress. Semen stains, it soaks in and he likes it that way. Rick wants Daryl to smell him at night, stuff fingers inside himself until he slinks bowlegged down to Rick's bed.

No mistaking intent, not anymore. Rick's ribs are clamped between Daryl's knees, hip bones opening like wings. He fastens their brows, regards Daryl from hot mottled chest to leaking dick. Looks him in the eye and holds him there as he cradles Daryl in his palm, stroking him swift and merciful. A nudge at his lip, and Rick grins lazily, sucks fingertips with hollow cheeks until Daryl fountains over his fist.

He lays his cheek on the tight bulk of Daryl's chest until a fist pulls him up by the hair. Daryl kisses shy, in trembling sips. 

“I need you,” Rick breathes into his mouth. Weaves all their history tight. “Are you with me?” If any god were listening, he thinks, I would pray. I'd wrestle down angels to watch over you.

Daryl trails fingers from Rick's chin to his throat, catching in the dip of his clavicle. “Yeah,” he rasps, flattening his palm over Rick's heart. His eyes are wide as Rick's ever seen. Daryl needs the lean hostile angles of his skull, his sneers, the veil of his hair. Catch him in the right light and he's unsullied rainwater blue under his lashes.

“Yeah,” Daryl says. “Just try and lose me.”

  
  
  


.

**Author's Note:**

> title via Warren Zevon
> 
> leave feedback and concrit below if you feel so moved, I like comments even more than ice cream (and I really love ice cream). this is the longest sex scene I've ever written and I tried to crawl under my couch repeatedly, you have no idea.
> 
> and hey, you can find me on [tumblr](http://h-yb.tumblr.com/)


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